How can you tell when an angler is in the zone? A couple of the contestants in Fishomania on Sky on Saturday afternoon were so described, although in one case I think the guy wasn't responding to the interviewer's questions because his earpiece was broken, and the other chap may well have been asleep.

But then I am not an expert. Though I have huge respect for angling – as one of the few sports where you can bring a packed lunch, it scores heavily over, say, jiu-jitsu – even its most proselytising adherent would have to concede it is short on visual thrills. Sky Sports, which fills its screens with it for a whole summer Saturday afternoon each year, tries to compensate in a number of ways.

For a start, it grants it Roman numerals: Fishomania XIX, as if it were Super League or American football. Then it gives some of the fishermen nicknames. "There's Chris Kendall, he's known as The Hatman," said the commentator. This, apparently, is because he wears a hat. A shot of a competitor with a particularly well-upholstered mid-region was accompanied by the intelligence "Steve Tucker there, they call him Buddha". If Steve's rivals consider that sledging, it's not quite in the John Terry class.

The presenter Rob Palmer, a jack of all trades at Sky, knows what's required, and gives Fishomania what Ron Atkinson used to call the full gun. "It's five hours of constant fishing," Palmer trumpeted (you still haven't got me, Rob). "Sixteen anglers in a quest for winner takes all. This is no place for losers, only a place for a winner. There may be the Olympics, Wimbledon, the Open, but if you're an angler this is the biggest sporting event of the summer."

We get the picture, but if Sky is serious about reaching out to the non-specialist, my advice would be to drop some of the close-ups in the opening montage of maggots being tossed into the water. That just prepares us for an afternoon of worm drowning. Fortunately there were three or four – or, as Sky would no doubt put it, III or IV – experts among what Rob boasted was a team of 130 (CXXX) able to deconstruct the business, including the excellent Keith Arthur, the so-called voice of fishing, whose empathy with the creatures of the deep is such that one fully expects the wide-angle shot of the studio to reveal him in a keep-net.

Did you know, for instance, that fish will settle on the bottom of a lake when barometric pressure is high, and you need to fish deeper? I am sure the guys round the lake in Staffordshire were aware, but Keith had lots of little hints like that to help us angling agnostics appreciate the achievement of XXXV-year-old quantity surveyor Warren Martin, who won the £30,000 first prize.

The women's top prize, by the way, was just £1,000, no doubt reflecting the fact that the people with the time and inclination to spend summer afternoons dangling worms into water are predominantly male.

Amir Khan was another sportsman described as "in the zone", putting on what is popularly known as his "fight face" to take on Danny Garcia in Las Vegas in the early hours of Sunday morning. A short film on Sky stressed how thorough Khan's preparation had been, ignoring the inescapable truth that if someone fetches you a meaty left hook round the lughole any game plan can begin to look a little flimsy.

And if Garcia's punch left Khan looking a little wobbly, it had a similar effect on Sky's team of pundits, Johnny Nelson, Glenn McCrory and Barry McGuigan, all of whom predicted a comfortable win for our boy, the only argument being whether it would come by way of knockout (Nelson, McCrory) or on a points decision (McGuigan). Post-fight, the pundits had to deal with Garcia's miraculous transformation, from a game fighter for whom the title shot had come way too early, into a hard-punching champ ready to take on the world.

Not that they took a step back. What I like about them is that they are as combative in the studio as they used to be in the ring, McGuigan particularly always ready to mix it with Nelson. He disagreed with the former cruiserweight champ on whether Khan should now step up in weight, on the wisdom of his training regime, and more or less everything else.

Boxing chat invariably knocks seven bells out of the pally punditry of other sports, so when Sky began its coverage with the commentator Nick Halling saying "At long last it's the day of the fight. All the talking has finally stopped", my reaction was "Say it ain't so, Nick." And, checking my schedule, I was happy to confirm there was at least two-and-a-half hours of talking before the main event.

Otherwise, I might have been deprived of Nelson's interesting view that "fifty per cent of boxing is 90% mental", a calculation that, in the wee small hours, made me buckle, much like Amir.